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Summary
Summary
The first comprehensive biography of the legendary figure who defined excellence in American sports: Jim Thorpe, arguably the greatest all-around athlete the United States has ever seen.
With clarity and a fine eye for detail, Kate Buford traces the pivotal moments of Thorpe's incomparable career: growing up in the tumultuous Indian Territory of Oklahoma; leading the Carlisle Indian Industrial School football team, coached by the renowned "Pop" Warner, to victories against the country's finest college teams; winning gold medals in the 1912 Olympics pentathlon and decathlon; defining the burgeoning sport of professional football and helping to create what would become the National Football League; and playing long, often successful--and previously unexamined--years in professional baseball.
But, at the same time, Buford vividly depicts the difficulties Thorpe faced as a Native American--and a Native American celebrity at that--early in the twentieth century. We also see the infamous loss of his Olympic medals, stripped from him because he had previously played professional baseball, an event that would haunt Thorpe for the rest of his life. We see his struggles with alcoholism and personal misfortune, losing his first child and moving from one failed marriage to the next, coming to distrust many of the hands extended to him. Finally, we learn the details of his vigorous advocacy for Native American rights while he chased a Hollywood career, and the truth behind the supposed reinstatement of his Olympic record in 1982.
Here is the story--long overdue and brilliantly told--of a complex, iconoclastic, profoundly talented man whose life encompassed both tragic limitations and truly extraordinary achievements.
Author Notes
Kate Buford has written for The New York Times, Architectural Digest, Film Comment, and Bluegrass Unlimited, among other publications. She has been a commentator on NPR's Morning Edition and American Public Media's Marketplace, and on Virginia's NPR affiliate, WMRA. Her biography of Burt Lancaster was named one of the best books of 2000 by The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post . She lives in Lexington, Virginia, and Westchester County, New York.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Buford (Burt Lancaster: An American Life) covers Thorpe's life of "high triumphs and bitter despair" in extensive detail. Thorpe (1888-1953), a "mixed-blood" Sac and Fox Indian from Oklahoma who starred for the legendary Carlisle, Pa., Indian school's college football team, won the decathlon and pentathlon in the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, prompting the king of Sweden to declare him "the most wonderful athlete in the world." The next year, however, Thorpe was stripped of his gold medals after it was discovered he had violated the amateur athletic code by playing minor league baseball. The loss haunted him throughout his hardscrabble life in which he abused alcohol, married three times, constantly needed money, and was an absentee father. His peripatetic story included myriad roles: avid hunter and fisherman; professional baseball player in the major and minor leagues; pro football player; bit actor with often degrading nonspeaking Indian roles in many westerns as well as in other movies, including King Kong; merchant marine during World War II; security guard at a Ford plant; bar and restaurant owner; supporter of American Indian causes; and regular speaker on the lecture circuit. Buford reports the facts and dispels many fictions about this American icon. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Buford gives a full account of the legend and tragedy of Native American sportsman Jim Thorpe, considered one of the greatest athletes of the twentieth century ESPN picked him seventh, ahead of Willie Mays, Bill Russell, and Gordie Howe. Bill Crawford's All American: The Rise and Fall of Jim Thorpe (2004) might be more popularly written, but Buford's account, at some 170 more pages, brims with detail, all of it relevant to the telling, from the disastrous divvying up of Native American land that young Jim witnessed in 1890s Oklahoma; to Thorpe's stellar performances in football, baseball, and track and field; to the stripping of his 1912 Olympics medals because he was paid to play baseball for two summers; and, finally, to the makeshift life he cobbled together after his playing days ended. Buford imparts a sense of the incandescent skills Thorpe applied to his sports, and the discrimination and self-destruction that shadowed him throughout his life.--Moores, Alan Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A CENTURY after Jim Thorpe first found athletic fame at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, his sporting career is preserved primarily by witnesses' words rather than by objective measurement. When he was at his peak, in the early 1900s, his best sport, football, was in its infancy, a rough game undergoing basic rule changes and largely devoid of statistics. What made him exceptional in any case was the unquantifiable combination of power and speed, only hinted at in yardage totals or points. Florid descriptions by the sportswriters of the day and recollections by those who played with him and against him make up a majority of the record. One reporter described his broken-field running as demonstrating "amazing intelligence," as he evaded tacklers "by an easy lope that carries him over the ground at remarkable speed without betraying any undue haste." His famed coach at Carlisle, Pop Warner, taught his player the technique of "unexpected contact," which Thorpe mastered, where you sometimes fake the defensive player to make him stop moving, "then, wham, you hit him with the hip or stiff arm," in the words of a teammate. In Kate Buford's biography "Native American Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe," the most objective measurement given for Thorpe's all-around athletic ability is in a section on his performance at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, where he won both the five-event pentathlon and, competing only six days later, the decathlon. Most impressive, she notes, was his time in the final event of the decathlon, the 1,500 meters, which he won in 4 minutes 40.1 seconds; it would be 60 years before an Olympic decathlon gold medalist would do better. Such speed and stamina emanated from a 176-pound man with an 18-inch neck and a 42-inch chest perched over a 32-inch waist and 24-inch thighs. As Buford writes of his feats in all sports, "his spectacular Olympic performance reinforced the unrecorded claims." Paradoxically, his 1,500-meter time, and all his marks in the individual events of the pentathlon and the decathlon, remain officially unrecorded, the result of the International Olympic Committee's decision in 1913 to strip him of his title and medals for having participated in minor league baseball games before the Olympics, a violation of the organization's draconian rule on "amateurism." Only posthumously, in 1982, would his gold medals be reinstated, but each event's numbers remained blotted out, and Thorpe was simply made a "co-champion" with the silver medalists who had subsequently been elevated to gold. Bud Greenspan, the filmmaker who has specialized in Olympic subjects, wrote in The New York Times about the righting of this wrong and the compromise it involved: "The joy felt by the entire sports world is somewhat diluted." Few awards that Thorpe won in his life were unalloyed, as that gold in 1912 literally was. (The Stockholm Games were the last to strike pure-gold medals, Buford informs us - one of many illuminating facts she has packed into the book.) He received coaching from one of football's greats, Warner, but was also exploited by that expert showman. The school that gave him his chance for success, Carlisle, soon vanished in scandal. The only sport in which he might have made a living in those days was baseball, his worst, and though he hit .327 in 60 games for the Boston Braves in 1919, he clashed with the manager (as a college and Olympic star, Buford says, "he had gotten used to being given lots of leeway") and never played in the majors again. Perhaps most devastating, his 3-year-old son, the joy of his life, died of inflammatory rheumatism in 1918. Though he "loved children," Buford states, the loss caused him afterward to "be guarded around them, aloof, even harsh." His fractured relationships with his other children bore that out. Buford's diligently researched, blow-by-blow chronicle is more "life and hard times" than "life and legend" and, as a result, is kind of a downer. She lays firm, clear historical groundwork for the reservation life and Indian world in which Thorpe grew up, in Oklahoma, but since she almost too judiciously interlaces the facts of his early on-the-field triumphs and off-the-field traumas, she misses an opportunity to make the true narrative drama of Thorpe's athletic exploits come alive. Capturing that excitement would have helped explain what she calls the "particular tenacity and passion" he engendered in so many fans. The dryness with which his feats are rendered, along with an overfondness for the word "incredible," mars those sections of the book in which Thorpe is constructing his legend on the field. In contrast, and perhaps not surprisingly for the author of a highly praised biography of Burt Lancaster, who played Thorpe in the 1951 film "Jim Thorpe - All American," the book's second half, which covers Thorpe's spotty film career, brims with life in its depiction of Hollywood during the 1930s and '40s. Thorpe existed on the fringes of the studio system, trading on his name and playing mainly small roles as an Indian, but he was also not afraid of anonymous manual labor, as when he hired on with Standard Oil to paint things ike gas stations and trucks. "Can't keep the wife and the kids in food on ancient glory," he told a sportswriter in 1930, when he was 42. Through Thorpe's struggles and striving, Buford recreates this period of Los Angeles history in all its glorious strangeness. WITH the rise of the western, he eventually found some success when he formed an agency offering authentic "Thorpe-certified'' Indians for the movies, but he was never a good manager. Drink and profligacy speeded his business failures and estranged him from his relatives. His plight wasn't helped by the string of bars he invested in or was hired to appear at, like the Sports Club in Los Angeles, "a small, dimly lit bar and grill on a noise-ridden street," as described by the journalist Al Stump, who produced what Buford calls "a haunting portrait" of the man: "He was weak, pliable, irresponsible and sometimes unruly, and he contributed to his own downfall." He was also "the embodiment of this country's eternal treatment of the vanishing Indian . . . underpaid, exploited, stripped of his medals, his records and his pride." Evidence of his previous sporting prowess bubbled up during his athletic afterlife (he broad-jumped within six inches of the world record for a movie-set wager), but more often he suffered the indignity of appearing as himself on sordid display, next to sideshow attractions like a flea circus. His death in a trailer park, in 1953, didn't allow him to escape the life of the vagabond. His body became a pawn in a ploy by his third wife to contract his place of burial to the highest bidder, resulting in the renaming of a Pennsylvania town in his honor. Even today, some people desire the return of his remains to his Oklahoma home, so that his soul may rest at last. Thorpe, in Buford's account a likable and engaging if feckless man, seems tragically destined to wander forever, the fastest itinerant in the world. Jim Thorpe at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm. Thorpe's unquantifiable combination of power and speed was what made him an exceptional athlete. Joy Jennings is a frequent contributor to the Book Review and the author of "Carry the Rock: Race, Football, and the Soul of an American City," which was published in September.
Choice Review
A former librarian and NPR commentator, Buford is also author of Burt Lancaster: An American Life (CH, Sep'00, 38-0197). Lancaster, in fact, played Thorpe in the film Jim Thorpe--All American (1951). In this thorough, exhaustively researched biography of Thorpe, Buford pays considerable attention to the athlete's private life. Thorpe was among the most outstanding all-around athletes in modern history, and the author fully examines his achievements in college and in pro football, major-league baseball, and the Olympics--including the rescinding of his Olympic gold medals (in pentathlon and decathlon) because he violated Olympic rules about amateurism (he had previously played semi-professional baseball). In addition, the author details at great length Thorpe as a struggling Native American child, husband, and father (he was separated from his children for long periods as he struggled to make a living by capitalizing on his fame). She gives a lot of attention to the issue of race, particularly in conjunction with Thorpe's years as a Hollywood movie extra and his support of Native American rights. Thorpe emerges as a proud but unhappy and disappointed person. A useful study, though the facts overwhelm the narrative a bit, and more analysis would have been welcome. Summing Up; Recommended. All readers. S. A. Riess Northeastern Illinois University
Kirkus Review
An impeccably researched biography of one of the world's greatest all-around athletes, a symbol of racial injustice and untapped potential.This retrospective is not the first to tackle the complex life of Jim Thorpe (18881953), but it's the most comprehensive. From his childhood in Oklahoma to career as a struggling actor a half-century later, journalist and biographer Buford (Burt Lancaster, 2000) chronicles a life filled with incomparable athletic achievements, government-sanctioned discrimination and wasted opportunities. Mischievous, overly generous, prone to alcoholism and habitually restless, Thorpe gained prominence on the gridiron at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an Indian boarding school where the half-Caucasian, half-Indian halfback played for legendary coach Pop Warner. He exploded into public consciousness in 1912, leading Carlisle to a national championship and winning gold medals in the pentathlon and decathlon in the Olympics. Controversy arose, however, as a prior dalliance in professional baseball would result in his medals being stripped (a lifelong struggle to restore them ensued, though they would not be returned until decades after his death). Stints as a professional baseball and football player followed, but Thorpe's poor fielding precluded stardom in the former, while the latter's nascent status resulted in less-lucrative opportunities than his talents warranted. After his prodigious athletic gifts deteriorated, he constantly struggled with marital problems, finding work and fiscal insolvency. The 1951 movie Jim ThorpeAll American immortalized him, though when he died two years later, more than four years passed before his remains were laid to rest in the newly christened Jim Thorpe, Pa.a result of family, community and government squabbles. Buford's attention to detail is largely a strength, but it occasionally breeds long stretches in which the minutiae of Thorpe's endless cycle of hopeful new beginnings followed by failures to capitalize obscure the narrative corethe tragedy of a groundbreaking athlete succumbing to obstacles both external (and unjust) and internal (and self-inflicted).Captures Thorpe's breathtaking highs and heartrending lows, but falls just short of his all-around excellence.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Jim Thorpe was arguably the greatest all-around American athlete of the first half of the 20th century, a star in track and field, football, and baseball, but his life was filled with struggle and disappointment. He was the recipient of honors and acclaim, yet Buford (Burt Lancaster: An American Life) makes clear he was subject to slights and racism as an American Indian in a far-less enlightened time. The author draws on extensive research and interviews to show not only Thorpe's athletic triumphs but also a dysfunctional personal life marked by alcoholism, divorce, and strained relations with his children. His forfeited Olympic medals were reinstated 30 years after his death, but Buford depicts Thorpe's legacy as one of a hero dishonored in his own country. This is the definitive biography of a legendary figure in American history, in and out of sports. An essential purchase. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
